Arithmetic is the death of story.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited...

All plots are cliche.

Hester Lipp had written Where the Sidewalk Starts, an inexplicably acclaimed book of memoir, recounting — in severe language and strange, striking imagery — Lipp’s childhood and adolescence on a leafy suburban street in Burlington....

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college…Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection...

Actually, the Sniper’s sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carla’s poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvy’s critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, focused on...

(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. ‘When you’re writing lines…you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We...

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn’t come up with a casual phrase with which to call for...

The future, vague and sad, did not frighten me half as much as knowing that it was not carved in stone.

Carla was wearing a No Fear sweatshirt. You are too old, Amy wanted to tell her, for legible clothing.

Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished...

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which...

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

…(W)here there’s drama, there’s crap.

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.

Just start the sentence…and see what happens. This is how we write.

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who...

(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.

Jenny Marzen is who again?” Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn’t know...